Tuesday, June 17, 2008

The AP plans to charge you $12.50 to quote as few as five words from them

The Associated Press is now requiring that bloggers and websites pay them for permission to quote as few as five words from its members' publications (e.g. The New York Times). So, what I'm wondering is what if you blog a quote that's five words the New York Times quoted from somewhere else? Basically, what if the New York Times quotes Hillary Clinton as saying something; if you blog about it and quote the quote (i.e. Hillary Clinton's quoted words), do you still have to pay?

As the a bit in the first link below states, we're entering a world where we can no longer even criticize the press freely, since we're bring required to pay to reproduce as few as five words of what they publish.

Read about it here and here.


Edited to add:

The
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) had a great piece on it that raises really valid points. They've also got a must-read section on their website that looks at bloggers' legal rights in the US. I hope to find something about similar legislation in Canada. Wikipedia's got a decent little section on fair use legislation that's worth reading, as well.

3 comments:

The Voracious Vegan said...

Ughghgh. Thank you for pointing out this new scaryness. As always I love your blog. You are a very talented writer and always informative and entertaining!

M said...

Wow. Thanks for the (too) kind words. I love your blog, too. I always look forward to reading it (and drooling over the fantastic recipe pics).

J said...

I second the Voracious Vegan in thanking your for bringing this to our attention.

This reminds me of a book I read recently, Naomi Wolf's 'The End of America', which I think could be extended to other places in the 'free' Western world. It basically showed how open societies are, well, closed, such as Nazi Germany, and how many of the things happening today (and this is just a further illustration of it), point to the idea that our societies are being closed and freedom as we know it could become a thing of the past.

Our 'mainstream' media has been so awful for the past few decades, things could get really bad should we no longer be able to criticize the media. Whatever happened to the media supposedly being a form of 'checks and balances' (at least here in America), were they ever a form of 'checks and balances'?